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Chicago be gone. Take your skyscrapers, your neoclassical architecture, your slivers of culture – and remove yourself from my sight. Take the 1,450ft of your Willis Tower, the Rembrandt and Van Gogh paintings of your glorious Art Institute – and fade in my mirrors. Take your blues clubs, your sports teams, your superb oyster houses – and, well, you know what you can do with those too. These – roughly – are my thoughts as I drive through the neighbourhood of Buena Park, on Route 41.

Behind me, the fact that Chicago is the third biggest city in the USA is all too clear. I can still see its hugeness, its buildings bristling. But while many visitors are drawn to this metropolis, I am attempting to make a swift escape from it along with the city’s commuters on a busy Friday afternoon. I'm not taking Route 66, which famously begins in this city, but a lesser-known road trip around the vast Lake Michigan.

"The fact that Chicago is the third largest city in the USA is all too clear"Credit:
AP/FOTOLIA

Daubed a silken gold by the descending sunlight, this shimmering body of water is a thing of indisputable beauty. It sighs and it shines. It nudges at the powdery curve of Montrose Beach, and flicks a supermodel’s smile at the work-truants snoozing upon it. It seems to grin at me too.

The joy – I remember – is that it will do this for the next 11 days. It will take me this long – almost two weeks – to sweep around what is the third largest of North America’s five Great Lakes. Only the third largest? Why yes. But the fact that this liquid behemoth is smaller in area than both its neighbour Lake Huron and the colossal Lake Superior does not make it a little fish. It has a shoreline of 1,400 miles. It is the sole member of the quintet to lie entirely in the USA – and in doing so, it touches upon four states (Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana).

Lake Michigan is a thing of indisputable beauty, daubed a silken gold by the descending sunlight

To drive all the way around it means a journey of more than 900 miles; one of the great road trips in a country which, from Florida to California, is a haven for said adventures. I shrug, forget about the bottleneck. I’m in no rush anyway.

My plan is to make a clockwise circumnavigation, clinging to the lake as closely as I can throughout. And when the congestion begins to clear, I start to recall just how good an idea this is. Illinois has a prettiness to it as Chicago finally recedes – Glencoe and its golf courses, Lake Forest and its waterside homes, Winthrop Harbor and its enormous marina.

The state line which falls directly north of the latter feels like a change of channel. For if Illinois is the TV blockbuster of the Midwest, and Chicago its Saturday-night star, then Wisconsin is its gritty cult-hit series. At least, it feels this way as I creep on, the lake ever on my right, Highway 32 picking up the waterside baton through Kenosha and Racine – until Milwaukee blocks my path as a rude awakening of lofty flyovers and railroad yards.

Tourists are not a regular part of its tapestry. Yet they should be

Wisconsin’s biggest city has a story which, though commonplace in the American narrative – a booming industrial 19th century, a declining 20th, a resurgent 21st – is largely untold beyond its own streets. Tourists are not a regular part of its tapestry. Yet they should be. The Harley-Davidson Museum on West Canal Street is a gleaming reminder that, while the image of the planet’s most famous motorcycle brand is forever tied to the biker gangs of Sixties California, the company was founded in Milwaukee in 1903, and remains its greatest export.

Down on the water, meanwhile, the Milwaukee Art Museum is all style and grace; its white skeletal structure – a clever design that includes “wings” which rise when it is open – is visibly the work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Within, the collection shelters pieces by Wisconsin native Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as shards by Warhol and Lichtenstein.

The Harley-Davidson Museum in MilwaukeeCredit:
ALAMY

I retreat to the Iron Horse Hotel, a restored mattress warehouse on West Florida Street, plot an evening on Old World 3rd Street – where beer halls salute the German immigrants who founded the city – and ponder staying for longer. I will not. Because I know just how many landmarks wait ahead.

Green Bay, 120 miles further north, is an American icon – a small city of giant reputation. To explore Lambeau Field stadium and its museum is to touch sporting glory – the community-owned Green Bay Packers still being, with 13 national championships to their name, the most successful team in American Football history; Davids in an era of big-franchise Goliaths.

But what of the Green Bay itself? It is there on my left when I flee the city, north-east this time, on to the Door Peninsula. This 85-mile feather of land tickles Lake Michigan’s side in a soft embrace of cherry trees and orchards, farms blanketing the land in furrows of soil, 11 lighthouses dotted on its limestone flanks as a warning to careless ships.

"This feather of land tickles Lake Michigan’s side in a soft embrace of cherry trees and orchards"Credit:
ALAMY

A fair precaution. At Whitefish Dunes State Park, on the east side of the peninsula, a wooden board identifies the nearby wreck of the Ocean Wave, a schooner which sank in a storm on 23 September, 1869. And yet, looking across the gentle blue of the lake amid the easy warmth of midday, I find it difficult to imagine that anyone could come to any harm here.

Perhaps the Midwest agrees with me. For when I exit the peninsula, clipping south before turning north, urban life seems to evaporate. After 55 miles on the 41, I am in the hotchpotch Wisconsin outpost of Marinette, where the River Menominee draws a line. The far bank, and the town of Menominee, belong to Michigan. But when I cross the bridge between the two, I do more than switch one state for another. I enter Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – an area so undisturbed that it feels as if someone has pressed a “mute” button.

I find it difficult to imagine that anyone could come to any harm here

Michigan is not a place renowned for tranquillity. Detroit, its rough-set “Motor City”, has long seen to that. But those who dismiss this crucial piece of the Midwest jigsaw as a blur of rust ignore the “UP” – a tranche of backwoods and bear prints which accounts for 29 per cent of the state’s solid ground, but only 3 per cent of its population.

Maybe you have to be brave to live here. With just 45 miles of soil separating Lake Michigan on the peninsula’s south side from Lake Superior on its north, there must be a fear that the two bodies of water will rise and annexe the forested refusenik keeping them apart.

There are few signs of habitation as Highway 35 seeps north, the village of Cedar River skulking in the shadow of Escanaba River State Forest, JW Wells State Park an empty campground on the lip of the waves. Ford River offers a lone orange school bus, children running to houses set back among trees.

At Rapid River, I turn east on to Route 2 and drift further from “civilisation”. At Ensign, a highway advert talks of dog-sled rides – a memory-jolt that winter is never far away in this northern realm. By the time I pause at Seul Choix Point Lighthouse, at the very top of the lake, I have not passed another car in 20 minutes.

"Michigan is not a place renowned for tranquility - Detroit has long seen to that"Credit:
AP/FOTOLIA

The silence is seductive, and the first sight of Interstate 75 – a wide-brim beast that cuts south from the Canadian border all the way to Miami, trucks barging along it – is a shock.

But there is an antidote – the Straits of Mackinac, where Lakes Michigan and Huron lock arms, their union crowned by the Mackinac Suspension Bridge, which carries I-75 over the gap; a Golden Gate Bridge for a colder climate.

A highway advert talks of dog-sled rides – a memory-jolt that winter is never far away

This is my cue to turn south, though only as far as Mackinaw City, where I stow the car at the docks and catch a foot ferry to Mackinac Island. No motorised vehicles have been allowed on this holiday outcrop since 1898 – but with two Great Lakes as my context, I am in no mood to stray. Indeed, I move no further than the veranda of the Geranium Bar at the Grand Hotel – a Victorian dame which opened in 1887 – and, with a glass of pinot noir, watch the sun slip under the bridge.

The temptation to drop anchor comes again. Mackinac Island has long been a centrepiece of this waterworld. But the rest of Michigan is calling – Route 31 a dreamy alternative to I-75, sticking to the east bank of the lake. Together, we go down through the Lower Peninsula – via Petoskey, a scrap of a town where Ernest Hemingway spent childhood summers; through Traverse City, an envelope of Americana where cafés and jewellers line West Front Street.

Mackinac Island tempts drivers to peel off the road and hop on the ferryCredit:
AP/FOTOLIA

The village of Arcadia is well titled, a lofty look-out point showing the lakeside in tree-swarmed majesty. Manistee flirts with the shallows at First Street Beach. Ludington is an escapee from a postcard – the sturdy red-brick Mason County Court House dispensing American justice, Ludington State Park a pregnant bulge of dunes where road signs advise to “watch for drifted sand”.

A scrap of a town where Ernest Hemingway spent childhood summers

When the 31 drops me into Grand Haven, I realise that mankind has fully reasserted its authority. There are ice-cream stores and surf-gear shops on Washington Avenue, hikers on the trail in Rosy Mound Natural Area, weighty burgers on the menu at eatery 22 Below, fellow guests on the porch of the Harbor House Inn, where rocking chairs sway in the breeze. It is Michigan at the seaside, minus the sea.

The burble of humanity grows louder as I pass Holland, South Haven, Lake Michigan Beach. But now, Interstates 196 and 94 are covering the hard miles, the roar of engines swelling. Outside Grand Beach there is a final change of allegiance, and I am into Indiana. Ahead, there will be freight containers on the water at Burns Harbor, and steel mills at Gary; the lake put to work, Chicago but 30 miles beyond.

The sun abandons Grand Haven pier for another dayCredit:
AP/FOTOLIA

But before I complete the circle, plunge back into the conurbation, Lake Michigan has one last delight to offer. Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is a fitting end to an odyssey of such length, dusty paths ebbing down between grassy hillocks; the waves, not for the first time, doing convincing impressions of the ocean. Here, along 25 miles of beach, is the Atlantic in microcosm, the Pacific in pocket-sized form, the horizon lost where the sky and the water make an indelible pact.

The essentials

Getting there

British Airways (ba.com), Virgin Atlantic (virgin-atlantic.com) and American Airlines (aa.com) fly direct to Chicago from London Heathrow. AA also flies direct from Manchester.